Archive: September 14, 2008 - September 20, 2008

How much good could a do-gooder do, if a do-gooder did good with wood? That question -- in some form -- seems to have occurred to former President Bill Clinton when he was writing "Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World," a very very very well-meaning 2007 book...

Rule No. 1 in this parlor game is, forget about books whose authorship is clouded by the mists of time. Nothing written before 1500 counts here. What critically acclaimed or bestselling books do you think were not written by their purported authors? Did Ted Sorensen write Profiles in Courage? Does...

The arrival of Philip Roth's new novel this week has got me thinking -- again -- about what reviewers should tell and what they should keep to themselves. Indignation doesn't turn on a shocking revelation the way his The Human Stain did, but on p. 54, the narrator reveals something...

You watched the video (if you haven't, click above); soon you'll be able to read the book. What publisher could resist the story of two guys (swingers, really, it was London in 1969) who bought a lion cub at Harrod's and raised him in their flat. When he got...

For more on David Foster Wallace, check out The Howling Fantods, a fansite which has linked to obituaries and tributes. They point out that Harper's magazine has put Wallace's (or DFW in fanspeak) articles up in PDF. The classic one to read, though they all approach genius, is Shipping Out...

David Foster Wallace killed himself last Friday. In the obituaries, I looked for his trademark footnotes, especially the one that would have told us that his suicide by hanging was just a postmodern joke played by a fame-averse author who wished to drop out of the world for a while....

I've always wondered how difficult it must be to maintain a reclusive persona in the highly publicized world of book publishing. J.D. Salinger, now 89, has managed it pretty well. So has Thomas Pynchon. Cormac McCarthy held out for years -- his wife Annie DeLisle complained that they were living...